Quotes by Playwrights - Page 122

The buckets emptied quickly, and men from different squads took turns bringing water from the gully that lay towards the city, where, in the feeble shade of emaciated mulberries, a muddy stream lived out its last days in the diabolical heat.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.
J. M. Synge
Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not
Jules Verne
You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded.
Oscar Wilde
The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!
Václav Havel
But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing has happened today except kindness.
Gertrude Stein
It was then that Hook bit him.Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter.
J.M. Barrie
If a choice is given to us between being mortal and being immortal, you will find no one in the group of mortals!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
Tom Stoppard
When will women become civilized enough to stop mistreating men? When will they cease from training their lovers to become providers, merely because they have the power to do so?As long as they continue as they are, men have no alternative to polygamy.
Esther Vilar
MOTHER TIME: Every New Year is the same. Every day, every second is too for that matter. But when we deliver them in secret, when another year just begins as a matter of fact, it's easy to fail to appreciate what a miracle it is to have more time. So, I suppose, it feels different right now because this time you're paying attention
Hillary DePiano
Universe is a giant with his body and we humans are a giant with our minds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
Thomas Bernhard
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
I dont know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all.
Cormac McCarthy
God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.
J.M. Barrie
Kick off your shoes. Unburden yourself with song. Tell each other tales. Dance around the table. Leave the cleaning up for the morning. Then go outside and look at the stars.
Noble Smith
Seize the hour.
Sophocles
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
T.S Eliot
Be what you are, all that you are. Wear yourself proudly. It will require that you draw a line, but that line in the sand is your courage.
Christy Hall
And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?
John Logan
Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.
Aristophanes
Flowers are the Romeos and the Juliets of the nature!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.
Robert Greene
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
Graham Greene
I have found men who didn't know how to kiss. I've always found time to teach them.
Mae West
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
…Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latch-key in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her. The man who, after twenty-five years of marriage, can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.
August Wilson
Here is the fate of the man: To appear and to disappear!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It's quite possible to leave your home for a walk in the early morning air and return a different person- beguiled enchanted.
Mary Chase
Long is the road from conception to completion.
Molière
Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
Tennessee Williams
Jack shall have Jill.Nought shall go ill.
William Shakespeare
A penny for your thought.
John Lyly
To know a very different person from ourselves is a great luck for us!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life.
Cormac McCarthy
Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.
Janet Burroway
Accursed be he that first invented war.
Christopher Marlowe
All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness but with energy and above all with illusions I pulled through them all.
Honoré de Balzac
Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.
Patrick Marber
My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If in the first chapter you say there is a gun hanging on the wall you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.
Anton Chekhov
The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.
W Somerset Maugham
What's past is prologue.
William Shakespeare
And she would not hold back his limbs when his heart was gone to the woods, for it is ever the way of witches with any two things to care for the more mysterious of the two.
Lord Dunsany
10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.
Brian Clark
In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men.
Plautus
The man who masters his own soul will forever be called conqueror of conquerors.
Plautus
It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?
A.A. Milne
If you fail, let the world knows the reasons of your failure; if you win, let the world knows the secrets of your victory! This is a great way to be useful for others!
Mehmet Murat ildan
First of all, they came to take the gypsiesand I was happy because they pilfered.Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing, because they were unpleasant to me.Then they came to take homosexuals,and I was relieved, because they were annoying me.Then they came to take the Communists,and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.One day they came to take me,and there was nobody left to protest.Bertold Brecht, inspired by Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin Niemöller
Bertolt Brecht
Since the future is unknown, no path can take you to the known!
Mehmet Murat ildan
She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. she was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only - the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.
Betty Smith
People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.
Langston Hughes
To make a child laugh, you don’t have to do something spectacular because they have already the ability to make themselves happy almost out of nothing!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me.
Christy Hall
When I stop [working] the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm working.
Tennessee Williams
HIPPOLYTUS: I can't sin against a God I don't believe in.
Sarah Kane